TLDR : You can’t see a competitor’s exact keywords or budget, but the Auction Insights report tells you almost everything else: who’s bidding, whether they’re getting more aggressive, and where. Run it at campaign level (not account level), watch impression share and position above rate for early warning signs, and use PMax’s search/shopping split to see who you’re up against in each space.
How to check if a business is running Google Ads
The clearest signal that a new competitor has entered your paid search space usually isn’t a direct one, it shows up in your own account first. Three metrics are worth watching every week:
- CPCs rising significantly without a change on your end
- Conversions dropping significantly
- Traffic dropping significantly
When one or more of these shift week on week, it’s worth asking: has a competitor entered the market? That was exactly the trigger in one account, where conversions tanked overnight with no obvious internal cause. A sign to go and check who else had started bidding in that space.
The place to check is the Auction Insights report inside Google Ads. It won’t tell you definitively that “Business X is running ads” before the fact, but it will confirm and quantify it the moment they start bidding against you. Which, for most ecommerce brands, is the earlier and more useful signal anyway.
How to find your competitors’ Google Ads
Once you suspect a new competitor, or want a regular view of who’s active in your space, the Auction Insights report is the tool to use. A few things make it far more useful in practice:
- Run it at campaign level, not account level. Looking at the account overall hides who’s actually bidding or appearing in specific auctions.
- Split by product or category where relevant. A brand running separate campaigns for, say, phone cases and fashion pieces will likely face a different competitor set in each, so treat them separately rather than looking for one blended picture.
- Compare week-on-week. Pull last week versus the week before to see which competitors are new to the space, and which are simply more active.
Inside the report, each competitor shows an impression share figure. If that figure climbs for a competitor week on week, they’re bidding more aggressively. Which usually means they’ve increased budget, or relaxed their ROAS targets to claim more real estate than you’re currently able to.
Impression share isn’t the only metric worth reading. Position above rate (how often a competitor appears above you) and outranking share both add useful context, a competitor can be gaining ground without their impression share being the first thing that moves. So it’s rarely as simple as one number telling the whole story.
For PMax campaigns specifically, the Auction Insights report lets you filter to search or shopping. So you can see who’s active in each space rather than treating PMax as one blended channel.
How to read what they’re running: Keywords, ad copy and landing pages
It’s important to be upfront about a limitation here: you cannot see exactly which keywords a competitor is bidding on, what their budget is, or what their CPCs are. The Auction Insights report shows you who is present in an auction, not the specific terms triggering it, particularly with broad match now so heavily used, precision on this front simply isn’t available.
The closest you can get is running exact match keywords yourself and watching who appears against them. If a competitor consistently shows up in the auction when you’re bidding an exact match term. You can reasonably infer they’re targeting that term too. But with a large exact match list, they may be present for some terms and absent for others, so it’s an indicator, not a certainty.
Brand campaigns are where this gets most interesting. In one account for a shoe brand, the same core brand term was consistently triggering a skincare brand’s presence in the Auction Insights report. Because both were bidding on that word, but with very different customer intent behind the click. The fix was to review whether the traffic to the shoe landing page was actually relevant. And narrow the campaign to more specific core terms (the shoe name plus “shoes”, plus “loafers”) rather than the standalone brand term alone.
Beyond keywords, ad copy and landing pages are worth reviewing, but with a clear purpose. This isn’t about copying what a competitor is doing; it’s about using what you see as a prompt to check your own account. If your ad copy relevancy is low, that’s a sign to optimise your own copy around what you’re bidding on. And to make sure your USPs are doing the work of earning the click,rather than reacting to what a competitor happens to be running.
How to act on it: Turning competitor insight into campaign wins
The real value of competitor research is what it prompts you to test. One clear example: a B2B account with resellers who weren’t direct competitors, but who were consistently including price points in their ad copy. The brand itself had a policy against using pricing in its own copy. But the market shift meant a price-led message was quietly winning the click-through rate battle.
Rather than assume that would work, the approach was to test it, a genuine pricing-led ad variant run alongside the existing copy. It outperformed everything else in the mix, and now runs consistently as a result.
That’s the model worth following: treat every competitor observation as a hypothesis, not a conclusion. “A competitor is doing this” becomes “let’s test whether this works for us”. With the account’s own quality scores, ad relevancy, and performance data as the deciding factor. Not what’s happening in someone else’s campaign.
Put together, a simple weekly habit covers most of this: watch CPC, conversion and traffic trends for early warning signs. Check the Auction Insights report at campaign level when something shifts; read impression share, position above rate and outranking share together rather than in isolation. And turn any pattern you spot in competitor messaging into a proper A/B test rather than a straight copy. It’s a process built on informed testing, which is exactly the kind of insightful, in-house-friendly approach that keeps a paid search account improving month on month.
Want this level of detail applied to your own account?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>Modo25’s paid search specialists run this exact process for clients every week, monitoring auctions, testing what actually moves performance, and reporting on it transparently. Whether you want full agency support or a supported in-house model. Our PPC team can help you turn competitor insight into campaign wins.
